To some extent I agree but I also feel that the law should not go a separte way from modern technology… email is everywhere and everyday tons of emails are sent in connection to agreements and businesses…

I feel this “long distance” communications issue is here to stay and may take a long time to be solved.

Thanks for answering my question.

As for email notices, the problem I have is that there is too much room for an email to inadvertently be deleted or overlooked, email server to crash, email to be stuck in a spam filter, lost in cyberspace, never sent due to some weird system error, etc. for me to allow for its use as a method of notice at this time. I have allowed for email to be used to provide periodic financial reporting that may be required under an agreement simply for convenience, but for notices of default and the like, delivery of email to a recipient and proof of its receipt is not yet reliable enough for me. And I am a techno-geek who was previously a system administrator. (Maybe that’s why I am so averse to email—I know what can happen to it in transit and how emails and email receipts can be altered.)

Then there is the matter of email notices. I allow for email notices as valid if and when acknowledged by the recipient and sent to a generic email address (e.g., legal-notices@ yourcompany.com) which comes to me (in the Legal Department) or another attorney when I am unavailable.

Finally, as other commentators point out, the era of the fax machine is coming to a close, so the tried and true notice provision allowing for faxed, facsimile, or telecopied notices requires updating.

I’d like to see all of these words go away; let’s replace them with “imaged” or something like it. A fax is more like a PDF or TIF file than unlike it, so perhaps we shouldn’t use different words which increasingly only serve to describe the recipient’s choice about how the transmission is viewed.

That said, some may still want to draw a distinction between the two based on the transmission “pipes” (i.e., phone vs. internet), but this distinction is also losing its relevance, what with VOIP and the like.

Then came the Telecopier, and one could electronically one’s document to the other side, subject to two comments. At the outset, there were hardly any firms or companies in Canada with the machines. Second, and more importantly, it took six minutes to transmit each page. Six minutes! Cheaper than a courier, granted, but time-consuming. It nonetheless gave us some breathing room, but a little less.

Then came the next generation fax machines (and they very quickly became so ubiquitous and cheap that a free-lance writer friend of mine had one in his home office, only a few years after the telecopier years!).

Then followed e-mail, and then the BlackBerry, …

None of which relates to the drafting issue that you raise, Ken, but the reference to telecopier brought that all back.

Cheers,

John

I was interested to note from the Wikipedia link in your post that “Western Union announced the discontinuation of all of its telegram services effective from 31 January 2006.” I also learned what a telex machine is, and how one works.